Claus Giesenberg wrote: > At the moment I examine possibilities and risks for the commitment of Java3D > in a CAVE for an company/university. > The company/university has the idea to implement a "Virtual Protoyping of > Mechatronic Systems" in a CAVE. Such a realization needs however very much > high orders since systems are supposed to be simulated here in real time.
This is our opinion of the subject as we are negotiating on a contract to do a very similar thing currently. The existing installation has a Very Large(TM) Onyx box that they have no interest in replacing. Onyx means SGI/IRIX, and their support for Java3D has been sketchy at best over the years. For us there is no question that Java3D will not be suitable for this work and we will be using OpenGL (with Java layer). While I personally feel that Java3D is fine as an API for building CAVE environments, most of the restrictions are not due to the API limitations. It is mostly logistical. If you were building a new CAVE and could spec Sun hardware, Java3D would probably be the natural choice. Maybe it is due to my lack of exposure to the highest-level Sun 3D hardware, but from what I have seen, I don't think their top of the range stuff comes anywhere near the SGI hardware. My recommendation is to first pick the hardware that you want to use for your capabilities, and then pick the API. Deploying java3D/Sun v deploying Performer/SGI is roughly equivalent development time to end up with a specific product (you don't mention what "realtime" work you want to do, so I'm assuming some form of terrain viz/simulator). As far as our project is concerned, the flakiness of the SGI support is the biggest killer, otherwise we would have given it a shot. -- Justin Couch http://www.vlc.com.au/~justin/ Java Architect & Bit Twiddler http://www.yumetech.com/ Author, Java 3D FAQ Maintainer http://www.j3d.org/ ------------------------------------------------------------------- "Humanism is dead. Animals think, feel; so do machines now. Neither man nor woman is the measure of all things. Every organism processes data according to its domain, its environment; you, with all your brains, would be useless in a mouse's universe..." - Greg Bear, Slant ------------------------------------------------------------------- =========================================================================== To unsubscribe, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and include in the body of the message "signoff JAVA3D-INTEREST". For general help, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and include in the body of the message "help".
